Most Difficult Part?

Hi, which topic you consider the most difficult part or the one you have to pay more attention to while studing for SCJP2? Maybe Threads and Inner Classes are the most difficult parts... [ February 12, 2004: Message edited by: Jorge Blaz ]

Yes, and maybe these two (Threads and Inner Classes) are also the less funny topics to learn, maybe because of their complexity. But what is sure is that Threads and Inner Classes are very powerful elements among the Java language, so it's really good they are included in the SCJP2 exam.

I thought I throw the following figures into this discussion, I think they are very useful figures but they are of course debatable. If you want to have a rough idea the difficulty for each SCJP 1.4 objective then have a look at the last table. If you want to see which objective is the easiest then look at the first table.

This list present the total of correct answers we have received the last month based upon almost 400.000 questions answered. The lists below exclude the questions that aspirants did not answer.

The following list is based on the same figures as the previous table but for the questions incorrectly answered.

Based on the figures Threads isn't the most difficult objective, however I do agree that Threads is difficult but I can only imagine that people really focus on the difficult parts and forget the so called easy objectives when preparing for the exam. [ February 13, 2004: Message edited by: Thomas De Vos ]

Yes, the figures show good points. I agree with you that people focus more on the difficult parts and forget to study more the easy ones, althougt is very relative which ones are difficult and which ones are easy, it depends on everyone. According to the figures, Collections should be the most difficult part. Although Collections is not an easy part, in my opinion is really funny to study them. Thanks for the figures, Thomas :-)

Thomas De Vos
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posted Feb 13, 2004 09:12:00

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Absolutely the degree of difficulty of an objective totally depends on each person individually. But the most important thing is that you need to identify your weakness, once you have discovered your personal weakness it will become your strength. This is what we have achieved with the websites to outline each aspirants weakness and strength.

Bert Bates
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posted Feb 13, 2004 09:51:00

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My answer is based more on anecdotal evidence, monitoring this forum and the results forum over time. The difficulty with using Thomas' data is that it assumes those mock questions accurately depict the real exam questions. If you go back and read results posted in the results forum, you'll see how people did on the actual exam.

Thomas De Vos
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posted Feb 13, 2004 10:20:00

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Bert, I agree completely. That was one of the reasons I included in my previous post that the figures are debatable. There are many factors that play a role to identify the grade of difficulty based on figures. This is the same with all the figures you use, you can turn them the way you want, manipulate them, set them to your hand, they do give an indication and definitely does not count for the majority of people who takes the exam.

So just to put things in perspective a bit -- I turned Thomas' chart into % of incorrect answers [ #incorrect / (#correct+#incorrect) ]

Ha -- and I just looked up my %'s from my exam -- and Collections, java.lang and Flow Control were my worst 3 sections -- pretty consistent with this data. However in my head I felt the Threads/InnerClasses stuff was tougher. [ February 13, 2004: Message edited by: Jessica Sant ]

Fair point Jessica. I knew before I made these figures that the ratio of answered questions within each objective where more or less equal. With a maximum of 10% difference between the most answered and the least questions solved (or not solved). The list shows the total of incorrect answered questions in relation of the total answered questions in each objective.

Hopefully these figures are helping someone to prepare for their certification. Jessica, I just saw your update on this post. I'm taking a feed from the live database when calculating so they differ a few percentages, [ February 13, 2004: Message edited by: Thomas De Vos ]